Data Talk – WordPress Migration!

Yesterday was meant to be Data Talk – but instead of being able to post a riveting piece about the joys of Excel, my blog had ground to a halt. WordPress isn’t very intensive, but the insanely cheap and unheard of host that I had been using was completely unable to cope with it.

So, a seamless migration has been completed. Wumga is now hosted on Amazon AWS.

It was a very straight forward process. The ‘All-In-One WP Migration’ Plugin made a file on the old host that I was then able to upload in the new space – this was seamless, with all themes/settings/plugins/everything just magically porting across. Jetpack was able to tell wordpress.com that I had moved my blog to the new space, moving across all the perks of having a wordpress.com account on self hosted software. Then I just had to change my nameservers to the Amazon DNS servers, and set up the Route 53 DNS zone settings to make sure it pointed to the right EC2 instance.

AWS looks crazy intimidating at first – especially when you you’re used to basic hosts and CPanel. However, once you get to grips to which sections you need (mostly your EC2 instance, your account and Route 53) it’s actually pretty straight forward. WordPress can be hosted on the Free Tier, on a ‘micro-server’. The performance you get from this should still be better than the sort of performance you can expect from any shared-hosting servers. There is a small charge for the Route 53 Namespaces – but at $0.50 a month, this is still less than most other hosting providers. The Amazon support guides are also amazing and very straight forward.

If you’re considering self-hosting a WordPress installation, then I’d highly recommend AWS. It can be intimidating using such a large and well known provider for something so small – but this is exactly what free tier was designed for. Just make sure you put on usage/billing caps to make sure you don’t accidentally start running up a huge bill.